Category Archives: University of North Carolina: School of Information and Library Science

Have you ever been struggling to find information on a particularly complex topic and thought “I can’t possibly be the first person to look for this”? You probably were not, and the searchers who preceded you may have left valuable “search trails” – including queries issued, results clicked, pages viewed, pages bookmarked, and annotations entered – that could help you locate what you need.

Rob Capra and Jaime Arguello, professors at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth nearly $500,000 to develop and evaluate systems that will automatically display relevant search trails as a form of search assistance to users. The project has the potential to improve a broad range of systems, including web search engines used by millions, digital libraries, and enterprise and website-specific search engines.

“Prior research has suggested the usefulness of search trails, but has not answered key research challenges required to design and implement them,” Capra said. “The system needs to predict when to display search trails to a user, which trails to display, and how to display them in a way that supports the user’s goal.”

Capra and Arguello will execute their project in three phases. Phase 1 will determine which factors of the user, task, and system influence whether a searcher wants help, for what purpose, and whether they are able to gain useful information. Phase 2 will develop models for predicting when to show trails to a user based on user and task features, as well as behavioral measures that indicate whether a searcher is having difficulty. Finally, Phase 3 will develop models for predicting which trails to show for the current search session.

The Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-National Library of Medicine (NLM) T15 Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Training grant. Only a handful of U.S. organizations were selected for this highly-competitive and prestigious award, which will provide approximately $3.1 million for doctoral student support, post-doctoral appointments, and short-term summer training for undergraduate students. The grant will serve as a significant resource for CHIP’s recently established PhD in health informatics.

“CHIP has already made great strides in improving health data analytics and analytics systems usability through our master’s degree and certificate programs,” said CHIP Director and UNC Professor Javed Mostafa, who is the lead investigator on the T15 grant. “Research by doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows, guided by CHIP’s world-class, interdisciplinary faculty, will advance this success even further, helping to improve the quality of health care for North Carolina citizens and the world.”

The UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) is a lead partner in the CHIP program, which draws faculty and expertise from units across campus, including the UNC School of Medicine, Gillings School of Global Pubic Health, UNC School of Nursing, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC School of Dentistry, and Computer Science Department. Read more>

UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson has received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Early Career Award to support a project titled “Deconstructing Information Poverty: Identifying, Supporting, and Leveraging Local Expertise in Marginalized Communities.”

The three-year project, which received over $336,600 in funding from IMLS, will examine the potential for libraries to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and their families fulfill their information needs and reduce information poverty in local ASD communities. It will also investigate how members of marginalized communities can act as self-advocates on a local level, and how libraries can recognize, empower, and educate all members of their communities through programming, planning, and collection development.

Gibson will collaborate with the Durham and Charlotte Public Libraries and the Autism Society of North Carolina (ASNC) for the project, which will culminate in the development and dissemination of an online toolkit that describes community assessment and engagement processes.

David Gotz, Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and Assistant Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP), has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth over $1 million to develop a set of contextual visualization methods that will improve analysis of complex data sets. Gotz and his team will evaluate the new methods in a health outcomes setting, offering significant potential to improve health care through data analytics. Ultimate goals for the four-year project include the development of open-source software that can help advance data visualization accuracy and efficacy for enterprises around the world.

“Datasets can have many thousands of variables, a stark contrast to the relatively small number of dimensions supported by current visualization tools,” Gotz said. “The gap between what the data contains and what the visualization shows can put the validity of any analysis at great risk of bias, potentially leading to serious, hidden errors. This research project will develop a new approach to high-dimensional exploratory visualization that will help detect and reduce selection bias and other problems.”

Gotz and his team will build on the premise that the very summarization that makes many visual methods effective also inherently obscures important aspects of a high-dimensional datasets. In other words, people cannot fully understand complex data, or make good decisions based on that data, if they are relying on a visualization that omits or misrepresents the context of the findings.

By working with institutions of multiple sizes and types, investigators will be able to glean important workflow insights that can benefit a variety of libraries and archives. Ultimately, all project information – including narratives, workflows, summary findings, training modules, and guides – will be widely disseminated to help other institutions successfully adapt OSS digital curation and preservation tools.

“We aim to make the daunting task of implementing digital curation tools more achievable for memory institutions nationally,” said SILS Professor Christopher (Cal) Lee, co-principal investigator for the project. “These activities will catalyze efforts across the library and archives fields by supporting more efficient and effective digital curation programs that ensure ongoing access to our increasingly born-digital legacy for all people.”

The iSchools Organization is pleased to announce the winners of its inaugural video contest. First place honors, including a $5,000 prize, went to Unleash the Power, a video submitted by the Department of Library and Information Sciences at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and coordinated by faculty member Francisco Javier Calzada-Prado. Additional honorees hailed from Asia and North America.

“We feel deeply honored to receive this award, and humbled that our work may contribute to raise the visibility of iSchools and the information profession,” said Calzada-Prado.

The iSchools Video Contest charged entrants with creating a short promotional video positioning the information field and information schools as exciting, new programs that educate undergraduate and/or graduate students to solve the information problems of the 21st century. The competition ran from September, 2015 through the end of January, 2016, and offered prizes of $5,000 USD for first place, $2,500 for second place, and $1,000 for third place. In addition, the top five honorees are eligible for a $1,000 travel grant to accept their award in person at iConference 2016, which takes place March 20-23 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Over a dozen entries were received from across the globe – participants included students, faculty, staff, and alumni from nine different iSchools in six countries. After careful review from a panel of iSchool leaders, the following have been awarded:

“With a winner from Europe and additional honorees from the United States and Asia, the demographics of our contest truly reflect the international nature of the iSchools organization and the caliber of work being done at information schools worldwide,” said iSchools Executive Director David Fenske.

The iSchools Video Contest winners will be recognized at iConference 2016, which takes place March 20-23, 2016, in Philadelphia. Their videos will be debuted to attendees, and links will be posted on the iSchools website at that time. The iConference is an international gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. The iConference is presented by the iSchools organization, and hosted each year by a different member school. The 2016 host is the Drexel University College of Computing & Informatics; this year’s conference theme is Partnership with Society, and registration is now open.

The iSchools Organization is a worldwide association of information schools dedicated to advancing research and studies in the information field. These schools, colleges, and departments have been newly created or are evolving from programs formerly focused on specific tracks such as information technology, library science, informatics, information science, and more.

(USA) “Dr. Rob Capra, Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support his research for the next five years on a project titled “Knowledge Representation and Re-Use for Exploratory and Collaborative Search.”
Capra will develop and evaluate new techniques for capturing, saving, and re-using search information, enabling individuals and collaborators to more efficiently conduct exploratory searches, and providing valuable search assistance to future users.
“Instead of starting from scratch, people will be able to benefit from information saved by others who have completed similar searches,” Capra said. “A goal of this research is to develop search tools that will help people in both the discovery and understanding of information, going beyond what is offered by current search systems. We want to enable people to capture and share the knowledge they acquire during a search in a way that will support collaboration and re-use.”
Capra’s research will provide insights about users’ needs for exploratory searches and how systems can best support them. Throughout the project, research activities will be integrated with a cross-cutting educational plan that will include UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate and graduate students engaged through research assistantships and course projects.
“We are delighted that Dr. Capra has won one of these prestigious five-year NSF grants,” said SILS Dean Gary Marchionini. “His work will lead to better support for human information needs that are complex and collaborative, and the project will become one of the centerpieces of SILS’ leadership in information seeking research.””Read more

Washington D.C.—The iSchools organization announces the election of Dr. Sam Oh of the Sungkyunkwan University iSchool in Korea to the position of iCaucus Chair. The iCaucus is the governing body of the iSchools organization, and Dr. Oh is the organization’s first chair from the Asia-Pacific Region. He has pledged to continue the iSchools’ mission of advancing the information field, while also expanding the organization’s reach.

“It is truly an honor to be the new iSchools Caucus chair-elect,” said Dr. Oh. “As the first person from the Asia-Pacific region to take on this responsibility, I consider it my express duty to promote the iSchool brand where it has remained less visible. I am grateful to those who have supported me and will do my utmost to represent the iSchool both in areas already at its forefront and in regions that have the greatest need of exposure to its initiatives.”

Dr. Oh’s election was formally announced on Monday, January 11, 2016. He will serve as chair-elect during the 2016-2017 term of iCaucus Chair Ron Larsen of the University of Pittsburgh, and then assume the role of iCaucus chair for the 2018-2019 term.

The election was presided over by outgoing iCaucus Chair Michael Seadle of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, who had this to say: “I am very pleased that the iSchools have elected Sam Oh from Korea as the new chair-elect. Sam has been the leader of the Asia-Pacific region of the iSchools, and his election represents another significant step in the internationalization of the organization.”

Dr. Oh earned his Ph.D. in Information Transfer from Syracuse University in 1995 and worked as an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School for four years before returning to South Korea to become a professor at the Sungkyunkwan University iSchool. He has taught summer courses at the University of Texas at Austin; Syracuse University; and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also spent a sabbatical year at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool. Dr. Oh served as the chair of ISO TC46/SC9 (Identification and Description) for six years and is currently the chair of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 (Document Description & Processing Languages). He is a member of the DCMI governing board and the iCaucus executive committee, as well as chair of the Asia-Pacific iSchools. His expertise lies in the fields of metadata design, social/big data analytics, and data/ontology modeling.

The iSchools organization is a worldwide association of 65 information schools dedicated to advancing the information field. These schools, colleges, and departments have been newly created or are evolving from programs formerly focused on specific tracks such as information technology, library science, informatics, information science, and more.

The iSchools organization is responsible for the iConference, an international gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. The iConference is presented by the iSchools organization, and hosted each year by a different member school. In addition to his duties as iCaucus Chair, Dr. Oh will serve as co-chair of iConference 2017, which will be co-hosted by Sungkyunkwan University Library & Information Science and Data Science Department and the Wuhan University School of Information Management; the event will be held in Wuhan China.

“It is with great pleasure that the ASIS&T Board announces that Javed Mostafa, Professor at the University of North Carolina, will be the next Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), starting in January 2016. JASIST is the premier research journal in information science.”Read more

“Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), has been named an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for her proposal “Big Data and the Algorithmic Threat to Democracy and Civil Society.”
Tufekci is one of two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty members chosen for the inaugural class of fellows. Patricia Sullivan, an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense in the College of Arts and Sciences, was also selected.
The new annual fellowship program provides up to US $200,000 to scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences who are pursuing research on the challenges facing U.S. democracy and international order in the next 25 years. Recipients are enabled to take a sabbatical of between one and two years to research and write.”Read more